The Most Beloved Steakhouse in Texas Started as a Cowboy Chuckwagon

How Perini Ranch Steakhouse became a West Texas institution.

When opening his steakhouse 40 years ago, Tom Perini did everything restaurant owners are advised not to do. “You’re supposed to be on a corner in a big city,” says Perini. “I opened Perini Ranch in an empty barn on our land, behind some trees so you can’t even see it from the road.”

Perini Ranch Steakhouse is about as remote as it gets: The restaurant is located in a tiny town called Buffalo Gap, population 463, that's a three-hour drive from Dallas Fort Worth in the middle of West Texas. Despite the stacked odds, Perini Ranch is celebrating its 40th year, so we spoke with Perini about his historic tenure.

Before opening his brick-and-mortar steakhouse in 1983, Perini cooked food for cattle ranchers on his chuckwagon for nearly 12 years. “A chuckwagon is basically a mobile kitchen, or a version of an early food truck,” says Perini. Fitted with storage for simple cooking equipment and ingredients, chuckwagons have historically been used to feed ranchers during multi-month cattle drives.

By the time Perini started cooking with his chuckwagon in the early 1970s, many other wagons had been retired. “I had a rare active chuckwagon and we’d call up these big ranches in our area in Texas and meet the cowboys out there” says Perini. “[The cowboys] would supply the mesquite wood and beef, and we’d do the cooking.”

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While cowboy culture may be over-romanticized, ranching was, and continues to be, extremely tough work. Meals provide respite from the physical intensity of the job, so, as Perini explained, if the food wasn’t up to snuff, he’d know it. “Have you ever heard the term upchuck?” Perini asked during our interview as he explained that “chuck” is synonymous with “food” in Texas, “That’s when you know the cook did a bad job.”

Making food for cowboys on the chuckwagon honed Perini’s cooking skills. “People ask me all the time where I learned how to cook so well. And I say, when you’re cooking for cowboys and one of them tells you there’s too much salt in your beans, you’ll never make the mistake again.”

Inevitably, though, it became clear that Perini couldn’t make the chuckwagon work financially. He wanted to find a way to still stay connected to the culture and people in the agricultural and ranching business. “I was told by a wise friend that I could do more for the cattle industry by cooking it than raising it, and he was right,” says Perini. “And the next year we opened a steakhouse.”

Perini Ranch Steakhouse is authentically Texan; it’s not littered with star decals or covered in longhorn hide, but is still in the original barn with large wooden tables and seating that sprawls outdoors. Its menu and design are purposefully simple. Tom and his wife, Lisa, operate the restaurant with quality and consistency as main goals — that, and an undeniable sense of genuine hospitality and warmth.  “My wife’s gonna kick me for this,” says Perini, “but I always call our place ‘a joint.’ A nice ‘joint,’ though. Because when you walk into this place you feel like you are in Texas and you know you are in Texas.”

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Since the start, Perini Ranch’s menu has kept beef at the forefront, and it’s always cooked over mesquite wood, a hardwood abundant in West Texas. To no surprise, they make an excellent burger, too, and serve signature vegetable sides like green chile hominy and zucchini Perini, an Italian family recipe that’s a delicious cross between zucchini parmesan and bolognese.

“In the beginning we were serving briskets and some steak,” says Perini. “We didn’t make baked potatoes because I hated the little bitty things that they had on the table in the old days with fake bacon and whatnot. I didn’t want to make french fries because McDonald’s is hard to beat.” Their signature cowboy potatoes are served skin-on, seasoned and roasted with plenty of garlic and butter. “We serve some steaks and not a lot of chicken — we’re more in the cowboy business.”

Despite their remote location and limited press at the time, in 1995 the New York Times named Perini Ranch’s mesquite smoked peppered beef tenderloin the mail order gift of the year. Unfortunately, at the time of that announcement, Perini Ranch did not do mail order (some wires must have gotten crossed between Buffalo Gap and NYC), but they quickly threw one together. To this day, you can have their smoked tenderloin, brisket, and meat sticks delivered to your door. The meat comes completely cooked, serves a crowd, and is unbelievably tasty and tender.

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That same year, the Perinis were invited to come cook at the James Beard House in New York City. “We were a small steakhouse, just out here in the middle of nowhere, and for the James Beard House to call and say they wanted us to come up and cook was a thrill,” says Lisa Perini. Since then they’ve cooked there numerous times and received the James Beard Foundation’s American Classics Award in 2014. In the late ‘90s they were hired by then-Governor Bush to cook at the Governor's Mansion in Texas, and eventually at the White House on multiple occasions. The team has cooked with Jacques Pepin, who visited Buffalo Gap in 2011 as a guest chef at the Buffalo Gap Wine & Food summit hosted by the Perinis.

Staying small — the Perinis have consciously refused multiple franchising deals over the steakhouse’s 40-year history — has allowed Tom and Lisa to focus on maintaining peak quality at the restaurant. They’ve also become some of the most influential people in American beef diplomacy. They’ve traveled around the world on behalf of the United States Meat Export Federation and the Texas Beef Council, lobbying for best practices and improved standards.

Both Tom and Lisa have served as president for the Texas Restaurant Association protecting independent restaurants like theirs across the state. “Independent restaurants are key to the culture of this country, and it's so important for us to fight for them,” says Lisa. “We love being the mom and pop of the mom and pop.”

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